


all last night it stormed

by bruised_fruit



Series: headcanon compliant [24]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Gift Fic, Guilt, Hot Chocolate, PTSD, decade era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21849961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bruised_fruit/pseuds/bruised_fruit
Summary: But she can make jokes again, and Maureen laughs at them, really laughs, hearty like Magnus, but with a small grin that stays on her face for moments after, like her captain. It makes her heart sing.
Relationships: The Director | Lucretia/Maureen Miller, past Davenport/Lucretia
Series: headcanon compliant [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1653871
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	all last night it stormed

**Author's Note:**

> i'm deep in the bowels of exam week, but i got the urge to fix up this old fic. originally written in august 2018 as a gift for bluecoloreddreams

_ It’s not like she’s someone who can’t be trusted, _ Lucretia tells herself. _ She’s helping us. _

Maureen’s asleep in bed beside her, snoring slightly, her hair plastered across her face. Lucretia has already decided she trusts her to a degree, of course. She and her son have been inoculated, and in return, they’ve been so helpful. The past couple months have been promising, finally, especially compared to the stumble after stumble that came before. 

Where did her delusion of competence come from? Her year alone? The crew’s kindness? No matter, she’s damned them all now, unless she’s careful, unless she has help. She’s not strong enough to get anything done alone. 

Lucretia has the urge, as she often does at this hour, to get out of bed and get away from Maureen. She just wants to find someplace empty and quiet to hide. Just to be alone, just to have the space to cry without disturbing anyone, without being a burden on someone so kind and so inexplicably good to her. She doesn’t want to disrupt Maureen, not again. She doesn’t want to show her this weakness, how bad things are. 

She can trust her with some things. Maybe not her true identity, or who Davenport was. Not anything about the crew: that she's mourning Lup, that she’s hiding from a potentially vengeful lich, that she checks in on these arbitrary men whose lives are falling apart in front of her eyes.

But she can make jokes again, and Maureen laughs at them, really laughs, hearty like Magnus, but with a small grin that stays on her face for moments after, like her captain. It makes her heart sing. 

Lucretia cries in front of her too, moments of weakness that don’t feel so Toril-shattering, and she had missed being comforted by someone who can talk, who she can stand to let touch her. She missed talking, she missed touching. 

And for the first time in a long time, she allows herself to be happy, sometimes enough that her head’s spinning with it, because the past few years have been so void of joy, other than fleeting, voyeuristic glances at her friends. She has so much now, she has more than she could have ever imagined before Maureen came into her life…

Not that she would had ever imagined she’d be here. She thought months, maybe a year or two at the longest. Lucretia’s stomach turns, and she sits up, the urge to get away and hide until her feelings pass overpowering. 

Maureen stirs, and Lucretia feels that tight knot of anxiety twist again. _ You trust her, _ she thinks, a useless reminder, because she doesn’t want Maureen to see how sick she is that this is her third night without sleep, and her thoughts are all mocking, suddenly, because surely she’ll catch on, surely she’ll hate, surely she’ll leave. 

And Lucretia doesn’t want to rouse her. To disturb her, to burden her. But this is excruciating, and now that she’s sitting like this, she’s not going back down, and she could go to the bathroom and sit there _ (wouldn’t that be picturesque), _but she’s been found there too many times, so instead she settles on making herself some tea. It might not be great, given how many times she’s been found crying in the kitchen under a blanket of Silence, but she needs something other than thinking and waiting right now. 

Lucretia extracts herself from the sheets and blankets and Maureen’s left arm as best she can, and the woman’s breathing changes somewhat, but Lucretia’s quiet as she walks to the door and hopefully, it’s okay.

She checks on Davenport on her way to the kitchen, pushing his door open and squinting at him in the dim light. He’s breathing, though a little unevenly. He never dreams peacefully anymore.

_ Why is he sleeping in a fetal position? _ she lets herself wonder, but she never has an answer, so she closes the door and heads down the hallway to their kitchen. 

The kettle hasn’t even begun to boil before Maureen pads into the room in her big fuzzy slippers, stretching her arms above her head. “Lucretia, there you are,” she says, too bright for 2 am, but it might be a mom thing. “Trouble sleeping?” 

“Yeah,” Lucretia says. 

“It’s been a couple nights now, right?” Maureen asks, concern in her tone, though Lucretia’s sure she’s trying to mask it. Weak, Lucretia is so weak, and it’s a sore spot despite how glaringly obvious it is. 

“I mean, yeah, but sleep is always kind of hard for me,” she says, and it’s the truth. Since the start of the century, more after 65, and tenfold since Wonderland… “I’m sorry if I woke you,” Lucretia adds, and the kettle begins to whistle. 

She’s not used to this. She’s not used to talking, and she’s especially not used to navigating conversations with someone like Maureen, even after the months they’ve had together. 

Lucretia turns to the stove, turns off the heat, stands there a moment too long. This body can’t take what she’s doing to it very well, and the little movement of walking across the kitchen makes her dizzy. 

“Want some tea?” she asks. 

“Hot cocoa,” Maureen says from right behind her, and Lucretia jumps. Maureen’s holding cocoa powder and sugar, and Lucretia takes them from her, forcing back a memory of Taako chiding her halfway through cycle three for her plebeian hot cocoa recipe.

“I don’t think it’s caffeine you need right now,” Maureen says softly, putting a hand on the small of Lucretia’s back, and Lucretia stiffens in spite of herself. 

Maureen makes a little noise and draws away slightly. “Let me make it,” she says, taking the ingredients back, taking the kettle, resting them on the kitchen table. 

“Thank you,” Lucretia says. 

Oh, she is so _ tired_, and it’s not until she’s seated and watching Maureen measure out the cocoa powder that she starts to feel it. Her bones are heavy, and it might be the magically-aged body, but everything aches. It’s hard to stay upright. Three days without sleep, and all because she’s afraid of a nightmare. 

Or not any one nightmare other than the one she’s living, and every horrible thing that's ever happened to her haunts her in every corner. And it’s the anxiety and the fear of the day that really keep her awake at night, but as soon as she closes her eyes, it’s her father and her bullies, it's their homeworld being destroyed, and it's the Hunger taking cycle after cycle, and losing crewmate after crewmate, her own deaths replaying over and over but none as horrifying as the things she saw happen to Magnus' body, it's the argument and the distancing and the cold detachment of betrayal, of losing for good, the wood of her staff hot under her fingers, it's watching entire towns destroyed by their relics, it's losing Lup, and it's Davenport, broken and hurting on the deck of the ship after she took _ everything _ from him, and it's Wonderland, beast after beast that she could barely fight off, all of the mindgames that nearly broke her—it's the crew dissolving in front of her eyes, it’s being consumed by inky blackness— _ is it here? Already?! _ How _ long _ had she been in the dungeon, she had wondered, terrified, desperate—and it’s the shrieking laughter of the Wonderland liches as she casts a shield between herself and her traveling companion because she doesn’t recognize his face, and it's fucking him over and knowing that's even more blood on her hands, but she had to escape, she had to leave or the whole crew would suffer and the terrors that they unleashed on this world would persist forever.

And it’s fighting Barry, tears obfuscating her vision, it’s watching Magnus get married then losing his bride so soon after and Merle having children and _ leaving _them and Taako killing himself little by little and the husk of Davenport having near-daily meltdowns that would have humiliated the man he used to be and it’s all her fault, it’s all her fault because she could have stopped the relics but she was too weak, and then she hurt her family more, exponentially more, and she’s still too weak to fix what she’s done. 

“Lu?” Maureen’s saying, and Lucretia jolts upright. 

“Y-yeah? Sorry,” she says, trying to collect herself, trying not to show, because _no_, it hurts_,_ _Lup_, but it’s fine, it’s _fine_, it’s only her and Barry who miss Lup right now, and Lucretia hardly has the right to dwell on what she couldn’t fix. 

“Sorry,” she says again. 

“You alright, dear? You’re falling asleep at the table,” Maureen says, her voice all soft and gentle like she’s talking to a child, or a crazy person, and Lucretia hates it, how Maureen can just overflow with concern for her even though she’s done nothing to deserve it. She only has the faintest knowledge of what Lucretia has lost and what horrible things Lucretia has done, and she’s never demanded a single thing from her. No explanation, no recompense or atonement. 

Imagine if she knew. Imagine if she knew that Lucretia has broken or killed every single person she’s ever loved. But not Maureen—Lucretia will protect her and her son from the relics, and she will save them from the Hunger too, and once she brings her family back, it won’t matter if all of them hate her, because they’ll be safe. They’ll be able to rest, finally. 

Maureen passes Lucretia a mug, looking at her expectantly, and Lucretia blinks, feeling like she’s being prompted to say something. “I trust you.”

It’s not true, and they both know it. But Maureen says, “That’s good to know,” and her tone is decidedly light. 

Lucretia won’t ever drop the glamour hiding her scars, or explain why she doesn’t comfort Davenport with hugs, and she won’t share anything of her nightmares, but Maureen’s never pushed her to, either. 

It’s hard to tell if she even wants answers, though Lucretia can tell Maureen wonders, and it aches just as badly as losing the six people who never bothered to wonder, as far as she could tell. 

“I just want you to get some sleep,” Maureen tells her, voice low. 

“Davenport will be up in a few hours,” Lucretia says, taking a sip of the cocoa. It’s very sweet. Lup could make better, but she still would have loved it. 

(Her heart hurts. Her head hurts. She’s just so _ tired_.) 

“Well, I’m up,” Maureen says. “I’ll make him breakfast.”

Lucretia nods in thanks. “He really likes your pancakes...” She trails off. He doesn’t seem to like her cooking. Sometimes it seems like she scares him, and everything she tries to do for him seems to hurt him worse. There is little that brings him comfort, and the solidity and warmth that used to emanate from him is gone entirely. When he comes back, he will be such a different man. She will have poisoned their love, and she will surely lose him forever, but maybe he’ll finally know peace. 

Or maybe he won’t. He might never be happy. She’s only hurt him, betrayed his trust, so hard-earned and carefully maintained, and she’s more than proven that she couldn’t trust him back, couldn’t handle a difficult conversation and the potential that he would reject her plan yet again. She doesn’t regret what she’s done, but she has no illusions about her most unforgivable sin, leaving Davenport in this state. 

Maybe he’ll hate her. Maybe he’ll blame himself for her actions, and even after all of her fighting and the victory that_ has _ to follow, a peaceful home won’t be enough to appease him. Lucretia could spend another several years dwelling on the horror of what she did to him, on his undeservedness of her cruelty. It’s difficult to imagine a fitting punishment, but hopefully Davenport will think of one. 

“I can’t sleep now, Maureen,” she says quietly. 

“Would it hurt to try?” 

Lucretia doesn’t reply. The longer she goes without, the heavier she sleeps, passing out soon after climbing under the covers, too tired for nightmares, and it’s nice, not thinking at all for those blissful moments before the morning, but she doesn’t say that. 

“I can, ah, wake you,” Maureen says, stepping around a direct acknowledgement of Lucretia’s nightmares, of how often she’ll wake the both of them with her screaming. It’s embarrassing, more than anything. At least when she used to share a bed with Davenport, he had the nightmares too. He understood in a way Maureen can’t. 

“I’ll be here the whole time, I told Lucas I won’t be over til the afternoon. You can sleep easy, you’re safe,” she says, and for some reason those words hurt so much to hear, and fuck, Lucretia’s not going to _ cry_. She has too much work ahead of her, and she’s so far from safe. _ When it finds us, when it crashes down... _What if she can’t keep Maureen safe? What if she’s unprepared, or what if the truth of who Lucretia is and what she’s done drives her away? 

_ I trust her_, she reminds herself. It’s been too many times tonight, and it’s a useless mantra. 

Maureen stands and takes Lucretia’s mug. Lucretia submits to a gentle kiss on the forehead. 

“You shouldn’t have to take care of me,” she says. 

Maureen hums, rinsing out their cups at the sink. “You know I don’t mind. And isn’t it nice to be cared for every now and then?” She’s casual about it, but her words pull at something in Lucretia’s chest. 

“It is,” she says, quietly enough that Maureen might not hear her over the water. But she’s smiling when she turns around, and she helps Lucretia up from her chair. 

“Let’s get you to bed then, darling.” 

**Author's Note:**

> title is the first line of girlyman's "genevieve," one of my favorites


End file.
